I'm a language guy. Back in the days when OOP was the big buzzword and massive function libraries roamed the earth, I realized that it was really these masses of pre-written code that would shape the way most of us worked most of the time. Yet I maintained my interest in languages.

The programming language we use empowers or hobbles us; it gives us the ability to write haiku or forces us to write The Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Languages, in short, still matter. Awash in C-like syntaxes and smothered by the Basics, it's easy to forget that.

Enter .NET into the picture. While bringing both a new Basic and a new C-like, .NET gives serious support to the use of non-mainstream languages through Microsoft's Visual Studio. After all, if you can plug-in to an existing IDE, defining and implementing a viable language for development gets a lot easier.

RemObjects has exploited this feature to bring us Chrome, a set of tools imbuing VS with the ability to create programs in a new dialect of Object Pascal.

Pascal began as a teaching language, which has always made it an easy target of derision, as has its status as a single-vendor language. Although there are other respectable Pascal systems out there, Borland has always been dominant (in the PC era), and they have determined the direction of Pascal as a mainstream product. Historically, this has resulted in some of the best programming tools ever, albeit with a Rodney-Dangerfield-esque lack of respect. (Borland doesn't even call the language Pascal any more.)

Invariably, however, a system with Delphi's history is going to atrophy to a certain degree, and Borland is saddled with the support of old code as well as a substantial customer base which will tend to regard major changes with some trepidation. Chrome cuts loose from historical Pascal to craft a language that more naturally embraces the modern Windows/.NET paradigm than legacy Pascal. Some of the discrepancies from Borland's dialect are minor, and some are major, but none are alienating. A few — most notably, generics — rely on .NET 2.0 features, which you'll want to be aware of if you're planning to roll out any apps.

As mentioned, Chrome plugs into VS 2005 (and is targeting mono.develop) so there are, basically, three reasons to use it:

1. If you want to use Object Pascal but you don't want to use Delphi
2. The Chrome dialect offers you something in the way of productivity or aesthetics other languages don't.
3. Portability to Mono interests you, but portability to Win32 doesn't.

I'll save the economics and marketing issues for last. First, let's look at what Chrome offers to make it technically interesting.

Note that this review was largely done with the September beta of Chrome.